Wandering Son Reflections, Episode 5 - Natsu no Owari ni (The End of Summer) ~Long, Long Shadow~

This is a continuation of my Hourou Musuko reflection series. You can see all the entries here.

You can watch the episode here.

Also, I’ve changed the name of this series. This felt more accurate, since it is not a review, really, as much as my reactions to the story on a personal level. I’ve also opted to start using the English translation of the series in the title. Also, now that the entire series has aired, I will be making occasional references to things that happen later in the series.

So, without any more delay, episode 5.

Trigger Warning: this entry contains discussion of cissexist slurs, in particular the T-word. If you want to skip that, start reading below the ‘End of Trigger Warning’ message

Also, Spoiler Warning

I’m going to start in the most obvious place: the subtitles in this episode use the word ‘tranny’. In fact, the word gets used several times in the series, but this is the first occurrence. So, I’m going to stop and discuss language for a bit.

When I read that subtitle, I winced; I’m particularly sensitive to the term, and even hearing it used in a reclamatory way makes me cringe. I’m just not a fan of this word at all. It offends me. But more importantly, it is a slur - actively harmful language. To understand my perspective on this, I actually recommend something written by someone else - Kinsey Hope’s excellent post on words and offense. In fact, I’m going to assume you clicked that link and read her post.

So, Kinsey has hopefully established to your satisfaction that slurs are bad. However, in a fictional story designed to be roughly representational of reality, slurs can have a function. If slurs are used in contexts that demonstrate the bigotry of the speaker or challenge their usage, then they have a place in the story. And, of course, words used in a reclamatory context are as acceptable in fiction as they are in reality.

Before we can consider how the word is used in Hourou Musuko, though, we need to ask whether the translation is accurate. The Japanese word that is being translated as ‘tranny’ is ‘okama’ (おかま). Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC, an all-around excellent Japanese language resource for English speakers, has this to say about okama (only the relevant part of the definition is provided):

(n) (colloquial, often derogatory) male homosexual; effeminate man; male transvestite

While gay men and transvestites are certainly insulted using the word ‘tranny’, as a slur its function is to attack trans women. As a result, this definition and the translation chosen didn’t really sit well for me. So I did some more research, and found this book, which discusses the use of ‘okama’ and gay male culture in Japan. The overall sense I got from this book’s treatment of the term is that the dominant cultural elements in Japan often conflate gender identity and sexual orientation (this is unsurprising, as it is true of straight culture in the US as well), and while GLBT culture in Japan distinguishes between the two more accurately, there is still some degree of conflation between the two. I suggest reading the excerpts available from the book for a more detailed look at this.

The upshot of all of this is that I get the impression that the translation here is accurate in context. Given the target and the speaker of the word each time it is used, I believe it was always translated so that it is accurate after adjusting for American cultural expectations. I am by no means an expert on Japanese language or culture, however, so I acknowledge that this argument may be flawed. At any rate, I’m proceeding with the understanding that the translation can be taken at face value.

With that said, I think the usage here is fair. The first usage we see is of a somewhat confused boy using it in disgust; another use is by a character who is well-established as cissexist and bigoted. The word is also used reclamatively, and almost accusatively, by Yuki (more on that in a later post). These instances of the word serve to present cisnormative reactions to the idea of transsexuality, and as such help depict the culture in which Shuuichi is struggling to define himself.

End of Trigger Warning

So, I hope you enjoyed 800 words discussing a single word from the episode. At that rate, we’re going to have a very long entry ahead of us! Luckily, the episode as a whole was pretty uneventful.

First, Shuuichi is outed to all of his friends as a cross-dresser. While shocked at the time, Shuuichi later seems to be somewhat relieved at having the truth (or an approximation of the truth) presented by someone else. Yoshino, on the other hand, responds to the person who outs Shuuichi with hostility. This leads Shuuichi to realize (via internal monologue) that Yoshino is willing to get angry on his behalf, and that she is “The person who understands [him] best”. Later, while talking to Mako, he says “People laughed at me. In grade school, they said I was girly. But you and Takatsuki understood me, so I knew everything would be okay.”

Watching those scenes, I realized something that hit me pretty hard: I never had anyone like Yoshino and Mako. Throughout my childhood, I had friends, but I was never close enough with anyone to tell them about my gender confusion. It wasn’t until I met my wife that I would find someone I was really comfortable being myself around. If I had had friends like that, I may have come to understand myself years earlier. Those years feel wasted in hindsight - years spent not being true to myself.

This kind of regret is common amongst trans people - at least, it is common amongst the trans people that I know. I am transitioning at the age of 27. Looking at average life expectancies, that means I spent one third of my life not being true to myself. Being in pain, and depressed, and not even understanding why for most of it. It is hard not to feel regret over that.

Hourou Musuko, of course, doesn’t really touch this particular problem; Shuuichi is still very young, and the story (in the anime, at least), doesn’t progress far enough to deal with the actual issues of transition. But it drudges up those feelings just the same.

Also in this episode, the students are assigned their roles for the upcoming play. Notably, they are assigned the roles by lots; Mako ends up being Juliet, while Saorin gets the role of Romeo. This is certainly an interesting plot development, since the story was clearly suggesting that Shuuichi and Yoshino would get the roles (and that would parallel the overall theme of the show more accurately). Instead, we get Mako, who has some gender confusion of his own, and Saorin, who certainly wanted to be Romeo, but only because she wanted to use it as a platform to profess her love for Shuuichi.

And Saorin, for her part, remains as unsympathetic as ever. She broods, whines, and is unselfconsciously self-absorbed throughout the episode, and ends the episode by asking Shuuichi (out of earshot) “Why art thou Juliet?”. While this certainly serves to underscore the play-within-a-play structure* that the Romeo & Juliet play represents, it serves even better to underscore Saorin’s selfish, cissexist attitude towards Shuuichi. Instead of wanting Shuuichi to be happy, she wants him to be hers, and her heterosexual identity means that, as a consequence, she wants him to deny his gender identity for her benefit.

* The extended homage to Shakespeare built into the first half of Hourou Musuko deserves analysis, but is outside the scope of this series’ focus. I’ll just leave it at ‘obviously, an extended homage to Shakespeare is going on here’.